1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method of fabricating silica-titania nanoporous composite powder and, more particularly, to a method of fabricating silica-titania nanoporous composite powder by spraying and heating method which is capable of preparing spherical-shaped silica-titania nanoporous composite powder by drying liquid droplets sprayed from a silica-titania-organic template mixture suspension by an ultrasonic droplet generator and heating the powder to remove the organic template in the dried composite powder.
2. Discussion of Related Art
A nanoporous material refers to powder having pores which are 100 nm or less in size. Since nanoporous materials are capable of impregnating catalyst materials in various nano sizes within the pores, they are used as the advanced nanomaterials for catalyst impregnation.
Much research of nanoporous materials has been conducted due to the variety of their potential application fields, such as catalysts, separators, coating agents, chromatography, low-dielectric constant fillers, paints, microelectro-devices and electro-optics, and the like.
As the prior art relating to the technology for fabricating nanoporous material powder, there are published U.S. Pat. No. 6,696,258 B1 (entitled: Mesoporous materials and methods of making the same; Filing Date: Jun. 21, 2000), Korean Patent No. 10-0385338 (entitled: Mesoporous silica, methods of compounding the same, and uses thereof; Filing Date: May 20, 2000) and Korean Patent No. 10-0549163 (entitled: Method of preparing silica-titania composite materials having nanoporous structure for impregnating biocatalyst; Filing Date: Oct. 20, 2001), and others.
However, in the aforementioned U.S. Pat. No. 6,696,258, Korean Patent Nos. 10-0385338 and 10-0549163, since nanoporous materials are fabricated by liquid phase method, there is a drawback in that it takes long time to prepare the nanoporous materials. Moreover, since the distribution of pore sizes of the prepared nanoporous materials is 10 nm or less, the application thereof is very restrictive and it is difficult to control the pore sizes.